Bicycling Newsletters

Read the full article, including the top 10 cases against Lance, an exclusive from the May issue of Bicycling magazine.
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Though I had an aunt whom cancer wasted to nothing in a trailer in West Virginia, and my wife had her thyroid removed because of the disease, I've otherwise been lucky to remain untouched by it. But I've visited Livestrong in Austin and read the plaques on the wall, each signifying a person fighting a battle I can't comprehend. I've walked over prayers chalked yellow on the roads of the Tour of California. I spent time traveling with the Chalkbot, the machine that spray-painted tributes along the route of the Tour de France. And in researching my book about the 2009 comeback, I came to know some of the cancer community. My sense is that they think less, "Did he cheat?" than I'm trying to stay alive, and this guy did it then won the Tour de France and I'm going to believe in that. We humans get pretty good pretty fast at compartmentalizing when it comes to life and death. Drawing hope from someone who cheated in a bicycle race isn't unreasonable.

His fervent critics are going to end up frustrated. He might lose his jerseys but I don't think he'll be judged guilty—in a court, anyway—of any crime related to doping, let alone fraud or racketeering. If I'm wrong, there's no legal sentence dire enough to slake their thirst for retribution.

It's those of us in the middle, the fans, who are stuck trying to make sense of what he's done, trying to decide what to tell our daughters and sons about him, and trying to remember that he must do the same.

His ultimate legacy most likely is out of our hands. Fans who may not yet be alive will decide who he was. To us, today, Eddy Merckx is the greatest cyclist who ever lived, not a fraud who tested positive for a stimulant while leading the 1969 Giro d'Italia and had his 1973 Giro di Lombardia win stripped for the same. Joop Zoetemelk is the hardman who started and finished 16 Tours—a record—and won one. He's not a reprobate who was caught doping at the 1979 Tour, received a paltry penalty of a 10-minute time addition, and maintained his second-place podium spot. Jacques Anquetil is the five-time Tour winner who in 1961 took the yellow jersey on Stage 1 and wore it all the way to Paris, not a boastful cheater who said, during a French television interview, "Leave me in peace—everybody takes dope." And Fausto Coppi is il campionissimo, the champion of champions, not an admitted doper who said on Italian television that he only took drugs when necessary—"which is nearly always."

We live in a different age, one that may not allow the forgiveness of Lance Armstrong, that may hold him to be the creator rather than the product of the era he reigned over. We might even judge this champion's cheating and lying too vile to permit the remembrance of the part of him that, even now, convinced that he doped to win the Tour, I can't stop being a fan of: the plain fact that he was, as even his bitter enemy Floyd Landis told me when we spoke last year, "a badass on a bike."